On a recent sunny afternoon, longtime singer-songwriter Keith Sykes, professional wrestler Jerry "The King" Lawler and legendary Stax drummer and "Blues Brothers" band member Willie Hall were gathered on a parking lot across the street from the Shelby Forest General Store, under the watchful eyes of multiple songbirds and — more to the point — a hovering drone camera.

The innovator responsible for this unusual blend of celebrity potpourri was the pajama-panted Pied Piper of Memphis party rap, Muck Sticky, who has doffed his Dr. Seuss hat for the metaphorical bullhorn and jodhpurs of a movie director.

Muck Sticky, auteur, on the set of "Dig That, Zeebo Newton."(Photo: Steven Kitchens)

Muck — born Justin Osburn in 1977 — is making a movie titled "Dig That, Zeebo Newton," a mini-budget feature that is a followup to his microbudgeted 2013 DVD release, "Muscadine Wine."

Via an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, Muck has raised about $27,000 from fans to help fund "Zeebo." (In comparison, the earlier film was produced for about "927 bucks," Sticky said.)

Set in a rural small-town "Stickyverse" located at the intersection of Hazzard and Yoknapatawpha counties, "Zeebo Newton" stars Muck as the title misfit, a bighearted innocent who, according to Sticky, "gets fired from his job, rejected by his dream girl, watches his best friend die from a terminal disease, is threatened with eviction and is abducted by the town bullies, known as the Hammerheads."

That's a lot of tragedy for what will be largely a comedy, as demonstrated by the scenes shot outside the general store. "Is this how how you met your wife?" asks Zeebo, during an up-against-the-auto pat-down from a civil rights-scorning sheriff, played with silver star and sinister shades by Lawler.

Searching Zeebo's car, Lawler improvised when he pulled out the end of a jumper cable: "I know a roach clip when I see one."

"I'm trying to channel a combination of Boss Hogg and Buford T. Justice," explained Lawler, who also was cast as a sheriff in the 2012 slasher comedy "Girls Gone Dead."

"I think that was the first movie ever where the villain gets killed with a piledriver," he said.

A sometimes golf partner of Muck's, Lawler said he agreed to be in the movie as a favor to his friend. Others in the project's all-star lineup of co-stars — a roll call that includes Amy LaVere, Frayser Boy, Al Kapone and Lil Wyte — agreed they were participating more or less to show support for a fellow musician. (For some, it was a reunion of the time they spent on Craig Brewer's 2009 MTV musical drama series, "$5 Cover.")

In T-shirts, overalls and bumpkin hats, Sykes, 68, and Hall, 66, play the general store's managers. Hall was a member of the Blues Brothers band in director John Landis' massive $30 million comedy epic of 1980, but he wasn't bothered by the gap between the projects.

"The only thing that divides it all is the budget," he said.

He added that acting is the flip side of musicianship, and both are only aspects of "being."

"All of being requires rhythm," Hall said. "The brain gives you a message and you have to figure it out through sights and sounds. It's all timing. It's all mathematics. The whole universe is mathematics."

The mathematics of "Dig That, Zeebo Newton" so far involve small numbers, by design. Although the cast is extensive, the crew is limited to a handful, with Ricky Greenway as director of "dronetography": His DJI Phantom 4 Pro "quadcopter" camera drone is contributing the types of aerial shots once found only in lavish productions.

In less "meet"-y terms, the movie is a fictionalized autobiography of the pre-Muck Muck, when Sticky was an insecure teenager and manual laborer rather than a flamboyant, self-invented musical performer whose inspirational party anthems, 18 full-length albums and 50 music videos have attracted some 200,000 social media followers, across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms. (Muck says his videos have been viewed more than 50 million times, which sounds unlikely until you visit YouTube and discover the song "Thingy Thing" alone has had 2.7 million visitors.)

Because of social media, the movie "already has a lot of built-in, fan-based excitement," Muck said. The film should be finished by June, after which it will be shopped to various sales agencies, with the idea that it will receive some sort of distribution before the end of the year.

"I call it an 'awareness movie,'" said Mama Sticky, who said she hopes the story of Zeebo (a name Muck discovered in "To Kill a Mockingbird") will provide hope for "people being bullied and people with insecurities."

If nothing else, the movie has inspired an unlikely musical combo. At 6:30 p.m. Saturday, May 27, during the "901Fest" of the Memphis in May International Festival in Tom Lee Park, Muck, Sykes and Hall will perform as "The General Store," covering Muck Sticky, Keith Sykes and Stax songs in the guise of their "Zeebo Newton" characters. The full 901Fest lineup is at memphisinmay.org.